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Can’t Keep a Good Hippie Down: ‘Hair’ Returning to Broadway

By Patrick Healy April 13, 2011 9:00 amApril 13, 2011 9:00 am

The national tour of the 2009 Tony Award-winning production of “Hair” has added an unusual stop to its schedule: Broadway.

The Public Theater announced on Wednesday that “Hair” would return on July 5, little more than a year after it closed on Broadway, for a nearly 10-week run at the St. James Theater. (The musical “American Idiot” closes there later this month.) Performances will conclude on Sept. 10, after which the producers plan to take “Hair” back on the road through the United States. Adding New York to a major national tour is relatively rare for a musical, although “Dreamgirls” kicked off its 2009 tour with an engagement at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

The Broadway encore of “Hair” will feature a mix of cast members from the 2009 revival (with Darius Nichols as Hud and Kacie Sheik as Jeanie) and from the tour, including Steel Burkhardt as Berger and Paris Remillard as Claude. Caren Lyn Tackett, who played Sheila in the pre-Broadway run of the revival in Central Park in 2008, will reprise the role on Broadway this summer.

Directed by Diane Paulus, the “Hair” revival opened on Broadway in March 2009 and quickly became an audience favorite as well as a critical hit; the show was nominated for eight Tonys that year and won one, for best revival of a musical. The producers, who struggled to raise money in 2008 to mount the Broadway revival after the recession began, ended up earning back their $5.7 million investment by August 2009, one of the fastest recoupments in recent history.

The revival closed on Broadway in June 2010 after weekly box-office sales dropped when the many members of the original cast left for a run in London. Despite good reviews, the London production closed after only five months.

The Public, a not-for-profit Off Broadway theater, ended up losing $200,000 on the London run, a failure that led to this winter’s ouster of Andrew D. Hamingson as executive director of the Public. He left when board members there learned, after the fact, that Mr. Hamingson had made financial commitments without their full knowledge for the London production of “Hair” as well as for the Broadway transfer of the Public’s “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” Mr. Hamingson told The Times that the decisions he had made were within his purview as executive director.

An executive with “Hair” said that no new capitalization was necessary for the coming Broadway run because it was included in the budget of the national tour.